


knock three times if you want me

by aunt_zelda



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe, Body Horror, Courtship, Other, Puns & Word Play, Riddles, Stalking, Threats, Watching Someone Sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:42:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25547644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aunt_zelda/pseuds/aunt_zelda
Summary: The first note is a simple yellow post-it stuck askew on her desk in the morning. Scrawling letters spell out “knock knock.”The note repeats on varying days for several weeks. Different colored paper, different colored ink. Sometimes she’d swear the ink shifts in color, the paper changes shade, the post-it shifts from a square to a circle to a star and back again.Sasha’s had a long day. Elias droned on at some staff meeting and cited some poor artifact storage bloke for violating the dress code. She finds another note on her desk when she returns, and she knows she threw away one this morning.“Who’s there?” Sasha mutters, tossing out the new note.A door creaks behind her.
Relationships: Sasha James/Michael | The Distortion
Comments: 6
Kudos: 53
Collections: Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	knock three times if you want me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [syrupwit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/gifts).



> Treat for the Multifandom Horror Exchange. 
> 
> Relevant subgenre tags: Institutional Horror, Paranormal Horror
> 
> I decided to take the "AU: Sasha became the Archvist" track here from one of your prompts.

The first thing Sasha does as Archivist is start digitizing the records. 

This is going to be a vast undertaking. The more she works, the more she finds. She starts to doubt it can be accomplished if she stays in this job as long as Gertrude did. Even with three assistants working under her (and oh, that’s a rush, being the boss at her age) their task seems impossible. 

Still, she has to try. She crafts a database and sets the others to sorting, tagging statements and stories with recurring themes. The majority are, of course, nonsense. People having a laugh, people who need mental health services, people outright repeating creepypasta stories and thinking it won’t be noticed. Sasha sets up an algorithm to run statements against, identifying key markers of the most common creepypastas. That cuts down on their workload significantly. 

There is one problem though. The Tapes. 

Sasha nearly breaks a monitor in frustration after the tenth attempt at digitizing a particular statement. Then she glances at the large box from Gertrude, full to bursting of tape recorders with peeling labels. She’d thought Gertrude was old fashioned, set in her ways and refusing to move with the times. 

Something … weird, is going on. 

A stack statements that make the computers go haywire forms at the corner of her desk. Tim offers to take them and Sasha winces. It feels wrong, to let them out of her sight. 

Worst is when she sets the others to investigating the outcomes of the statements that only take to tape, rather than digitizing. People who vanished. People who died gruesomely. People who changed their names and fled the country. People who now live with debilitating injuries, addictions, mental health breakdowns. 

Something very weird is going on. 

~*~

The first note is a simple yellow post-it stuck askew on her desk in the morning. Scrawling letters spell out “knock knock.”

It’s none of the assistants. Sasha knows all their handwriting. 

She shrugs it off as a cleaner’s attempt at a joke and throws it away. 

The note repeats on varying days for several weeks. Different colored paper, different colored ink. Sometimes she’d swear the ink shifts in color, the paper changes shade, the post-it shifts from a square to a circle to a star and back again. 

Sasha’s had a long day. Elias droned on at some staff meeting and cited some poor artifact storage bloke for violating the dress code. 

She finds another note on her desk when she returns, and she knows she threw away one this morning. 

“Who’s there?” Sasha mutters, tossing out the new note.

A door creaks behind her. 

Now, Sasha is extremely familiar with her office by this point. There’s certainly no door behind her desk. There’s sliver of wall between two bookcases painted an especially manky green. There is no door there. 

Sasha pivots and reaches down for the drawer where she keeps miscellaneous objects. Her keys. A set of wrenches and screwdrivers. Loose change. A letter opener. An illegal pepper spray canister she obtained after listening to some of the more lurid statements. 

There’s a door now, between the bookcases. It’s vividly red. The handle is a gleaming gold. It’s slightly ajar, creaking slightly. 

“Lena …” the voice is a trilling sort of tone. 

“Lena … who?” Sasha grasps the pepper spray in the drawer. 

“ _Lena_ little closer … I’ll tell you a secret.” 

A hand reaches around the frame of the door. The fingers are long, longer than any human’s ought to be. Sasha has familiarized herself with a lot of conditions, to help weed out the statements made by ableist assholes. Marfan Syndrome hands don’t look like these hands. 

“Would you like to make a statement?” Sasha asks. She blinks. Where did that come from? She should be screaming for help, or running. 

The door opens. There’s a … person, in front of her. At least, there are visual cues that form into “person” in her head, a general body shape, long curling hair, clothes that hurt to look at, a mouth with too many teeth, eyes that are … 

Sasha slams her hand in the desk drawer and yelps in pain, looking away briefly. 

When she looks up, the door and the creature are gone. 

She grabs a letter opener and taps on the wall, searching in vain for a seam, a latch, something. There’s nothing of course. 

Martin bursts in, wailing about worms and a woman who was more walking corpse than human, and Sasha has to go do her job. 

~*~

Sasha hasn’t told anyone about the creature, yet. Or the door. She’s combed through statements and identified several that feature doors, mysterious hallways, liminal spaces. It’s all very 2010s Tumblr to be honest, which was why many of the statements had initially been cast aside. Now she’s reassessing. 

There are definite patterns and recurring themes. Spiders. Fire. Music. Books. Curses. Disease. Stories she’d swear are werewolf fanfiction gone awry. Insects. Clowns. Elderly women. 

The others are looking at her askance. She notices. None of them really used to believe in this stuff. The worm thing has them all spooked, and now Sasha is acting a little … obsessive. She’s getting jumpy. She works late hours. She starts to feel the distance growing between herself and Tim and Martin and Jon. When they were all assistants together it was one thing, now there’s a yawning gap that widens by the day. She knew it would happen when she was promoted, but she’d hoped it wouldn’t happen so quickly. 

A few times Sasha has fallen asleep at her desk. Once, she wakes up with a blanket draped over her, soft cashmere crocheted in a spiraling pattern that seems to draw her close. She folds it carefully and keeps it in a drawer of her desk, occasionally reaching down to stroke the curling fractals of yarn when her day’s been especially stressful. Sometimes Sasha would swear she can hear a contented sigh when she does that. 

It’s on one of the late nights that Sasha hears the door creak again. It’s not behind her this time, it’s in front of her, wedged neatly beside the actual door to her office. 

Sasha rubs at her eyes hurriedly and opens the topmost drawer, hand going to the pepper spray. 

“Archivist,” the creature sounds like it’s groaning. “Do you think that little thing can harm me?”

Sasha shrugs, not taking her eyes off the slowly opening door. “I don’t know. Will I have to find out?”

The thing emerges. It unfolds itself out of the door in a motion that reminds Sasha of an umbrella in reverse. 

“Perhaps. You have been rude. I sent you many notes. It took you so long to respond.”

Sasha gulps. “Well, you didn’t sign them. You know my … name, in a way. What should I call you?”

The creature blinks and it’s like the flash of an old-fashioned camera. “Hah … what should you … what am I …” it leans its head on a hand and the room seems to sway.

“Can you … stop that, please?” Sasha asks, gripping the edge of her desk for support. 

“No.”

“You can’t, or you won’t?” Sasha squints. 

“… yes.”

It’s toying with her. Better to be a toy than prey, perhaps. “Is there something you want?”

“Oh, yes!” the creature nods enthusiastically and the room shudders again. “I am here to … warn you.”

Sasha waited.

And waited.

“Warn me about what?”

“Everything!” the creature spreads its large, large hands. 

Sasha bites back several colorful curses. She’s pretty sure she heard the click of a recorder in the drawer, even though she hadn’t touched it. 

“You are in danger, Archivist. Terrible danger.”

“Why?”

“Because you are the Archivist.”

“Could you elaborate on that? My predecessor lived to a ripe old age, before she vanished.” 

The creature hisses suddenly and scuttles halfway up the wall. “Archivist! Do not invoke the one that came before!” 

“Why not?”

“You occupy her space. There is limited space.”

Sasha glares. “If you’re going to speak in cheap riddles, you should just go. I have real work to do in the morning and I should get back to sleep.” 

The creature seems to weigh its options. “You may call me ‘Michael.’” It says finally. 

Sasha’s mind backtracks to that part of the conversation. “Ok. Thank you, Michael.” It feels wrong to call it that, like something’s stuck in her throat. “Could you please be more specific about the warnings of danger?”

It lifts up a hand and starts to count off on its fingers. 

“The Flesh Hive and its worms. The one who lurks below. The one who perches above. The past and the future. Your assistants. Yourself.”

Sasha blinks rapidly. She would swear Michael counted off on five fingers, and yet …

“What about my assistants?” she focuses on that. The worms she understands somewhat, with statements and clues. The other warnings seem like more riddles. 

“Can you trust them? Soon they’ll be targets, if they aren’t already. Some will be lured by pretty promises of protection that you cannot provide.” Its lips smack on the words and Sasha can feel a migraine coming. 

“I trust them.” Of course she does. 

“Can they trust you? Will you feed them to the dark, the cold, the scorch, to see what will happen?”

“I don’t quite understand what you mean, but no, I will not sacrifice them in whatever game you think we’re playing.”

It laughs at her. The laughter seems to slice the air itself. “Oh Archivist! So fresh and new, and already you see that things are in motion on a board. The question is, are you a piece or a player?” it scratches a grid on the wall with its sharp fingers. “

“What are you, Michael?” Sasha asks. “A piece, or a player?”

It laughs at her again, louder this time. “I will see you again, Archivist.” It rolls back through the door and melts away.

Sasha takes a painkiller for her head, and sleeps deeply, curled up with the blanket. She dreams of doors and endless corridors and laughter. She dreams of a chessboard unfurling before her and a hand stretching out over the squares. 

She dreams of possibility. 

~*~

Worms attack the Institute. Sasha is cornered, with her letter opener in one hand and the pepper spray in the other and no illusions of her survival chances in the next five minutes. 

“Archivist! Catch!” 

A door in the ceiling opens. Something comes flying out, something red and shiny. Sasha drops her meager weapons and grabs it: a fire extinguisher. She turns the nozzle on the worms and it kills them. She laughs with relief and triumph. She rescues Martin and Jon from the break room and finds Tim wielding his own extinguisher. 

“Some uh … someone, gave this to me,” he says, eyeing Sasha suspiciously. “Said he was a friend?”

Sasha frowns. “He … he is.”

Distantly, Sasha hears grating laughter echoing down the Institute’s corridors. 

When Sasha returns to her office, the Institute firmly scoured of any worms, she finds a bouquet of folded paper flowers in a dozen shimmering shades. Nobody has ever sent her flowers before, and she can’t hold back the flustered blush that rises to her face at the sight of them. 

There’s another note, on paper that doesn’t even bother to pretend not to change shape in her hand. _Down the hall. Left. Right. Right. Twist._ A perfectly normal looking key sits waiting.

Sasha goes of course. She finds a disused storage room and unlocks it. There’s a rickety old desk, dusty shelves, some boxes, and a cot. The cot is old but the bedding looks new and fresh. There’s another folded paper flower on the pillow. Sasha sits down and realizes she’s going to be spending a lot of nights here in the future. 

She looks at the wall. There is and there is not a door there. Sasha can almost start to see the outline. 

There will be more attacks. More strangeness. She needs to know as much as she can, to stay safe, and keep the others safe. 

Grimly, Sasha stands up and approaches the door. She raises her hand and raps – once, twice, three times – on the door. She steps back. 

The door creaks open. 

“Hello, Archivist.” 

“Hello, Michael.”


End file.
